Beware
The Bluewash
By
George Monbiot
28
August, 2003
The
US government's problem is that it has built its foreign policy on two
great myths. The first is that it is irresistible; the second is that
as time advances, life improves. In Iraq it is trapped between the two.
To believe that it can be thwarted, and that its occupation will become
harder rather than easier to sustain as time goes by requires that it
disbelieve all that it holds to be most true.
But those who oppose
its foreign policy appear to have responded with a myth of equal standing:
that what unilateralism cannot solve, multilateralism can. The United
Nations, almost all good liberals now argue, is a more legitimate force
than the US and therefore more likely to succeed in overseeing Iraq's
reconstruction and transition. If the US surrendered to the UN, this
would, moreover, represent the dawning of a fairer, kinder world. These
propositions are scarcely more credible than those emerging from the
Pentagon.
The immediate and
evident danger of a transition from US-occupation to UN-occupation is
that the United Nations becomes the dustbin into which the United States
dumps its failed adventures. The American and British troops in Iraq
do not deserve to die any more than the Indian or Turkish soldiers with
whom they might be replaced. But the governments which sent them, rather
than those which opposed the invasion, should be the ones which have
to answer to their people for the consequences. The vicious bombing
of the UN headquarters last week suggests that the jihadis who now seem
to be entering Iraq from every corner of the Muslim world will make
little distinction between khaki helmets and blue ones. Troops sent
by India, the great liberal hope, are unlikely to be received with any
greater kindness than western forces. The Indian government is reviled
for its refusal to punish the Hindus who massacred Muslims in Gujurat.
The UN will swiftly discover that occupation-lite is no more viable
than occupation-heavy.
Moreover, by replacing
its troops, the despised United Nations could, in one of the supreme
ironies of our time, provide the US government with the escape route
it may require if George Bush is to win the next election. We can expect
him, as soon as the soldiers have come home, to wash his hands not only
of moral responsibility for the mess he has created, but also of the
duty to help pay for the country's reconstruction. Most importantly,
if the UN shows that it is prepared to mop up after him, it will enhance
his incentive to take his perpetual war to other nations.
It should also be
pretty obvious that, tough as it is for both the American troops and
the Iraqis, pinned down in Iraq may be the safest place for the US army
to be. The Pentagon remains reluctant to fight more than one war at
a time. One of the reasons why it has tackled Iran and North Korea with
diplomacy rather than missiles is that it has neither the soldiers nor
the resources to launch an attack until it can disentangle itself from
Iraq.
It is clear too
that the United Nations, honest and brave as many of it staff are, possesses
scarcely more legitimacy as an occupying force than the United States.
The US is now the only nation on the Security Council whose opinion
really counts: its government can ignore other government's vetoes;
the other governments cannot ignore a veto by the United States. In
other words, a handover to the UN cannot take place unless George Bush
says so, and Bush will not say so until it is in his interests to do
so. The UN, already tainted in Iraq by its administration of sanctions
and the fact that its first weapons inspection mission (UNSCOM) was
infiltrated by the CIA,1 is then reduced to little more than an instrument
of US foreign policy.
And until the UN,
controlled by the five permanent members of the Security Council, has
itself been democratised, it is hard to see how it can claim the moral
authority to oversee a transition to democracy anywhere else. This problem
is compounded by the fact that Britain, which is hardly likely to be
perceived as an honest broker, is about to assume the council's presidency.
A UN mandate may be perceived by Iraqis as bluewash, an attempt to grant
retrospective legitimacy to an illegal occupation.
None of this, of
course, is yet on offer anyway. The US government has made it perfectly
clear that the UN may operate in Iraq only as a sub-contractor. Foreign
troops will take their orders from Washington, rather than New York.
America's occupation of Iraq affords it regional domination, control
of the second biggest oilfields on earth and, as the deputy defense
secretary, Paul Wolfowitz has hinted, the opportunity to withdraw its
troops from Saudi Arabia and install them in its new dependency instead.
Republican funders have begun feasting on the lucrative reconstruction
contracts, and the Russians and the French, shut out of the banquet,
are being punished for their impudence.
Now that the US
controls the shipping lanes of the Middle East and the oilfields of
central Asia and West Africa, it is in a position, if it so chooses,
to turn off the taps to China, its great economic rival, which is entirely
dependant on external sources of oil. The US appears to be seeking to
ensure that when the Iraqis are eventually permitted to vote, they will
be allowed to choose any party they like, as long as it is pro-American.
It will give up its new prize only when forced to do so by its own voters.
So, given that nothing
we say will make any difference to Bush and his people, we may as well
call for a just settlement, rather than the diluted form of injustice
represented by a UN occupation. This means the swiftest possible transition
to real democracy. Troy Davis of the World Citizen Foundation has suggested
a programme for handing power to the Iraqis which could begin immediately,
with the establishment of a constitutional convention.2 This would permit
the people both to start deciding what form their own government should
take, and to engage in the national negotiation and reconciliation without
which democracy there will be impossible. From the beginning of the
process, in other words, the Iraqi people, not the Americans, would
oversee the transition to democracy.
ecome unsustainable,
it will be forced to retreat in a manner and at a time not of its choosing.
Iraq may swallow George Bush and his imperial project, just as the Afghan
morass digested the Soviet empire. It is time his opponents stopped
seeking to rescue him from his self-destruction.
George Monbiot's
book The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order is published
by Flamingo. www.monbiot.com
References:
1. See for example
Milan Rai, 2002. War Plan Iraq. Verso, London.
2. Troy Davis, 2nd
April 2003. Building Iraqi Democracy. http://www.worldcitizen.org/